


dream me a dream

by hiza-chan (callunavulgari)



Series: dream me a dream (sandman au) [1]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Dark Month, Disturbing Themes, Gore, Hallucinations, M/M, Nightmares, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:47:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/hiza-chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Mr. Sandman,” he whispers, voice gone sing-song and lilty. “Bring me a dream.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	dream me a dream

**Author's Note:**

> [Dark Month: Day 22](http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac67/Uffa__/banners%20Lj/Screenshots/Mo4_zpsae68e312.jpg), Sandman AU. It was nice practice for that Guardians AU I’m surely going to be writing once it comes out, because damn Jack Frost looks like Roxas. Title is not actually me mishearing the lyrics. There used to be a Ghostbusters episode with this title, and ever since I’ve preferred ‘dream me a dream’ so much that I frequently sing it that way.

He’s had the nightmares for as long as he can remember—creepy, dark, horrorthings crawling in the shadows out of the corner of his eye. His mother tells him that even as a baby, he would wake screaming and terrified—that the fear and the night terrors lasted throughout his toddler years and well into elementary school. As far as she knows, they’d stopped in fifth grade, giving their home a much needed reprieve from all the screaming.  
  
For Roxas, fifth grade was just when he learned how to control it better. It was the time when he stopped waking to the sounds of his own shrieks and started waking with the yell choked up in his throat, stuck there like peanut butter.  
  
So he’s always had nightmares. He isn’t like the kids who get them after they’ve seen a scary movie or gone through some kind of tragedy. They’re a constant thing, waking every night with cold sweat drying on his skin and red eyes peering at him over the edge of his bed.  
  
When he dreams, it’s of a world that couldn’t possibly be real. A diseased world with buildings that scrape the sky, shadows that melt up out of the pavement, and skies that weep blood. His hair is wet, the blood getting in his mouth as he watches a creature edge its way around the side of a building, its mass taking up the whole street. Its maw gapes wide and Roxas can make out teeth as long as he is.  
  
He shudders and watches it warily, because sometimes he forgets.  
  
A jagged claw traces its way down his spine, splitting cloth and skin alike.  
  
By the time he spins, it’s too late. This new creature with the glowing yellow eyes and brackish teeth is already lunging.  
  
He wakes to the feel of teeth chewing on his intestines and frantically blinks into the sunlight, sliding a trembling hand across his belly, feeling out the smooth, untarnished skin there. Sometimes he forgets that the worst of the monsters aren’t the ones that you see in front of you. Those ones are almost always behind.  
  
Roxas doesn’t sleep much.  
  
.  
  
The night terrors get worse, the eldritch monsters that stalk him in the dream world edging into the waking one. When he’s sixteen, they follow him to school—corpses that shamble after him, their guts dragging along the pavement and leaving smears of red and gray. He can barely close his eyes anymore without feeling their touch on his skin, the bogeyman come real, just waiting for him to surrender.  
  
Catching the bus home from school, he watches the landscape pass him by—the spruce and maple trees that line the road, the children playing in their yards.  
  
He blinks and something with the face of a tiger and the body of a goat tears a little girl in half, her spinal cord glistening red and white and shattered in the sunlight.  
  
Squirming in his seat, he blinks again, decisively, and the same girl giggles as she falls into a bed of leaves.  
  
.  
  
“I’m worried about you,” Xion tells him, her dark eyes wide. Sora stands next to her, chewing on his lip and fidgeting with his sweater.  
  
Around them, snow falls, settling and melting in their hair.  
  
“Roxas, everyone’s worried,” Sora breathes, trying for a shaky smile. Roxas thinks about laughing in their faces, about spitting at them, howling and calling them names, because they have no idea—  
  
Instead, he smiles.  
  
“I’ll be fine,” he assures them. “Really, I just need to get some more sleep.”  
  
They try to smile, but they're trembling and faulty around the edges. Sora laughs, the sound unnaturally loud in this still, white world. He throws an arm around Roxas’s shoulders and grins. “You’re right,” he says. “You just look so tired all the time... Sometimes you even look like you’re seeing something that isn’t there. It’s scary, Rox, that’s all I’m saying.”  
  
Even Xion’s smile broadens at Sora's laugh, snow in her lashes.  
  
Roxas blinks and watches their flesh melt away from their bones, twin skeletons gleaming back at him, snow catching in their eye sockets.  
  
.  
  
He is nineteen the first time that he sleepwalks off the roof. In the real world, he has a broken arm and several fractured ribs. In the dream, he drowns in quicksand, choking on the grit in his throat.  
  
.  
  
When he wakes to the white walls of the hospital, Namine is watching him with shrewd blue eyes. Behind her, Sora is sleeping, slumped into a chair against the wall, neck lolling at an awkward angle.  
  
“Enough is enough, Roxas,” she whispers, her words like steel.  
  
“I don’t—”  
  
“I said enough,” she breathes, quietly powerful, like a swelling breath of the wind. She takes a deep breath and looks around the hospital room. Sora sleeps on, the machines beep, and nurses hustle by in the hallway like little worker ants. Quietly, Namine sighs, and turns to look at him once more.  
  
“I have a friend who you need to meet,” she says, getting from her seat and drifting closer, until he can see the flecks of green in her eyes.  
  
He drifts back into sleep with the feel of granules of sand clinging to his eyelashes.  
  
.  
  
Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream—  
  
“Y’know, I’ve always hated that song.”  
  
He spins, the dreamscape whirling before him, colors blurring together. He’s in a desert tonight, a single blooming tree before him, it’s branches long, heavy enough that the pink petals brush the sand.  
  
Beneath it, a man stands—his tangled red hair braided with dozens of mementos and keepsakes—fine golden chains, gemstones, multi-colored beads, and what appear to be dream catchers. His eyes are a green that makes Roxas think of the spruces back home, the smell of them in the winter.  
  
The man grins and waves. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you for another few years, sweet-cheeks. Did you miss me?”  
  
Curious, Roxas drifts closer. The sky is bruised purple and pink, a twilight realm that glitters with hundreds of stars and looks nothing like the grayish-black twilight of home.  
  
“This is—”  
  
“Beautiful, right?” the man says, digging his boots into the sand and kicking at it. “A nice change from your usual dreams, wouldn’t you say?”  
  
He’s right, of course. Usually Roxas would be dead by now, shaking himself awake with a new set of horrors painted to the insides of his eyelids. The man leans against the tree, one pale hand wrapping around a branch, long fingers toying with the petals. “The name’s Axel, by the way. You could call me the sandman like every other soul that finds it’s way here, but I do miss the way you used to say my name.”  
  
“Axel,” Roxas breathes, and the man brightens.  
  
“Yes, just like that,” Axel sighs happily, slumping even further onto the tree.  
  
“I—”  
  
“Bad dreams, I assume,” the man interrupts, kicking away from the tree and starting towards him. “No, don’t look at me like that, I’m a busy man, I can’t control whether you get corrupted sand or not.”  
  
Roxas glares at him, but Axel just smiles happily, patting his shoulder when he reaches him.  
  
Axel’s hand threads through his hair and the smile dims faintly. “Of course,” he continues. “I’ve been watching your supply rather closely and I have to say—finest golden sand I’ve ever cultivated, the kind of sand reserved for kings, and you turn it black as coal.”  
  
Roxas feels something sift in his chest, like the sand that Axel speaks of. His breath starts to come faster and for the first time, he is well and truly afraid. Because this is it, this is everything. Every hope he’s ever had that someday, this might stop—that he could bargain or plead—that someday he might be normal has just been squashed beneath this stranger’s heel.  
  
Axel smiles sadly. “Never have I ever, Roxas-dearest. You’re one of a kind.”  
  
.  
  
He wakes gasping, white hospital walls closing in around him. But for the first time, there are no monsters stalking him around the bed, no horror world bleeding into his own. There’s just Sora, watching him hopefully from across the room.  
  
.  
  
That night, when he sleeps, he dreams of fighting the monsters in his head—a blade in each hand, every movement calculated and graceful. Their blood splashes on concrete, dripping grey and black liquid that hisses and burns away at the very ground until it is washed away by the blood rain. He fights until he’s exhausted and only then does he wake, heart torn from his chest the moment he staggered.  
  
.  
  
“This isn’t working,” he tells Axel the next night, Namine’s sand still gritty in the corner of his eyes. This time, the dreamscape shifts between seasons, golden-red leaves catching sunlight one second and spring flowers blooming the next. Axel regards him carefully as he drifts closer, his coat drifting along behind him, like he’s keeping an eye on a cornered animal. When he reaches Roxas, he lets their foreheads touch—his skin like fire against Roxas’ icy brow.  
  
“I know, dearest. I’m sorry.”  
  
.  
  
The next time he catches the bus to school, he has to blink helplessly, trying to dislodge the horrors. Not once does he glimpse the real world. At school, he watches the shadow monsters flock around his feet, their claws skittering over his flesh.  
  
He watches them crawl all over Xion in class, tearing her flesh from her bones, shadow-veins crawling sluggishly across her face.  
  
Roxas bites his lip and doesn’t make a sound.  
  
.  
  
That night, the dreamscape is another twilit realm, the sunset gleaming red on the horizon. Axel sits beside him, munching on a frozen treat and regarding the empty streets below them.  
  
“Perhaps you should just stay here,” Axel says quietly, nudging their shoulders together.  
  
Roxas draws his legs up to his chest, pressing his face into his knees. His response is garbled into the cloth, but Axel seems to understand him neverless. “If I stayed here, I would never wake up,” he mutters.  
  
“But would it be worth it, darling?” the sandman asks, green eyes glittering like gemstones in the rays of the sun.  
  
“Maybe, it would,” he breathes, like a secret.  
  
.  
  
He wakes to real blood dripping down his arms, lacerations across his chest, and a broken window letting the chill breeze in. When Sora bounces into the room to wake him, his eyes go wide with horror and he flinches backward. In that moment, Roxas watches his brother’s eyes go yellow and his skin grow dark with shadows, cloaking him like a wetsuit.  
  
“Roxas, what did you do?” the monster asks with his brother’s voice.  
  
Roxas closes his eyes.  
  
“Sing me to sleep, Sora,” he sighs.  
  
.  
  
“Mr. Sandman,” he whispers, voice gone sing-song and lilty. They’re on a beach, the waves lit with hundreds of blue lights and the sky with thousands of stars. The breeze tugs on the ends of Axel’s hair, dreamcatchers jingling like bells. Axel watches him with that familiar sad smile on his lips and lets Roxas fall into him—lets Roxas press his face into his chest—feeling the warmth of his skin and the softness of his jacket. This close, Axel smells like all those pages of his life gone by—like leaves in the rain and car rides with his family in the summer. He smells like the strawberries that Sora and he had picked in the second grade and the gardenias they’d gotten their mother for her birthday.  
  
Roxas burrows closer and breathes deep, letting a happy noise escape as he feels Axel’s hand settle in his hair, tentatively stroking through, nails catching on his scalp.  
  
“Bring me a dream,” he sighs, letting his eyes fall closed.  
  
This close, Axel smells like home.


End file.
